My entire experience as a ‘hacker’ can be summed up like this: Back in high school a friend and I taught ourselves how to gain administrative access to every computer in the Computer Sciences lab by overloading the internal IP of any machine with DOS Prompt ping requests, and once we had done that we amused ourselves by ordering various other machines in the lab to open their CD trays at random times.
So, y’know. I’m not exactly Kevin Mitnick or anything over here. But Hacknet has a command called openCDtray that actually opens your real DVD tray in the real world if you use it in the game while connected to your in-game computer. That’s pretty awesome.
Hacknet also does some other stuff well, like being almost entirely based around terminal commands. If there’s an .exe you need in the game to up your hack skills, you best know how to ‘scp’ that file to your own machine, because there is barely any clicking. It’s all commands, and it’s all awesome.
Hacknet opens with you, the player, receiving an email that has been sent because a 14 day Deadman’s Switch has activated. Another hacker, named Bit, is dead, and wants you to get to hacking to solve his murder. His automated emails set you up with your first hacking .exe and a few handy tips, and then as a final act he involves you with a group called Entropy, a hacktivist collective bent on keeping hackers looking good to the public.
But joining Entropy requires completing a series of tests, which is a theme that repeats a few times during the game, and once you’re in you take on contracts to increase your hacking reputation, which in turn triggers more of the story.
That right there is the core loop of the game, and it sounds simple, but the rub is this: the game does very little handholding. You aren’t going to be able to breeze through all the hacking you need to be doing through luck — you’re gonna need to read up. I thought I was pretty clever when I effortlessly hacked into my first computer, only to realize I hadn’t a single clue how to breach a firewall when I hit my first one. Figuring that out took some work.
I accidentally used the wrong terminal command, and deleted a file I needed instead of downloading it to my home machine. That sucked. Had to start the whole game over, which was annoying.. but also really cool, because it wasn’t a bug, it was me. I did that.
Hacknet is awesome, and immersive, but isn’t without actual issues. There are a number of game ending issues right now. Some of them can be worked around, but some of them can’t be. If you abandon a mission, you’ve basically screwed yourself. If you follow the directions in one quest, you open a folder that hard-locks your game. But for every bug I encountered, I was pleased to see the developers are aware and working on fixing.
And while these sorts of bugs might be annoying for some, by the time I completed my first successful play-through these bugs had simply become another obstacle to hack around. A mission that didn’t unlock which provides a program you need to finish the game suddenly became a challenge to work around — using another mission located at the same computer system to grab a file I needed which provided the IP address of the program made me feel like even more of a hacker than the game intended.
Issues aside, Hacknet might be the coolest game I’ve played in years.
A code for Hacknet was provided to SideQuesting for review by the developer.
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